The Extensible Markup Language (XML) was originally envisioned as a language for defining new document formats for the World Wide Web. XML can be considered to be a meta-language; a language for defining markup languages. XML is a text-based format that provide mechanisms for describing document structures using markup tags such as words surrounded by ‘<’ and ‘>’ symbols.
As XML's usage has grown, it has become generally accepted that XML is not only useful for describing new document formats for the Web but is also suitable for describing structured data. Examples of structured data include information which is typically contained in spreadsheets, program configuration files, and network protocols. XML is preferable to previous data formats because XML can easily represent both tabular data, such as relational data from a database or spreadsheet, and semi-structured data, such as a web page or business document.
With this proliferation of XML data, there is a significant need for tools for visualizing XML documents as well as a common framework upon which these tools can be built. To date, a great many tools for visualizing XML mainly focus on displaying the raw XML text in a well formatted manner and with certain syntax coloring to distinguish various lexical constructs. However, there is no system which describes a system for visualizing XML documents based on their logical structure as opposed to physical structure and which provides a mechanism for visualizing these logical structures.
Thus, there is a need for a method or system to allow a view of the logical structure of a structured document to an observer form such as a graphical user interface or a programming language object. The present invention addresses the aforementioned needs and solves them with additional advantages as expressed herein.